Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit (By Bruce B. Lawrence)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit by Bruce B. Lawrence Gordon D. Newby (bio) Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit Bruce B. Lawrence New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell Manifestos, 2021. 192 Pages. Professor Bruce B. Lawrence, The Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Humanities Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Religion at Duke University, has published his latest work, Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit, in the Wiley-Blackwell Manifesto series. In an introductory overview, Lawrence declares his work to be a Manifesto in three words and six chapters. His choice of the genre of manifesto gives this work a personal, confessional voice and a hortative message that encourages the reader to adopt a different historical worldview and a new analytic vocabulary. His starting point is to return to and invite into the intellectual and moral worldview of Marshall G. S. Hodgson, the author of the posthumously published three-volume work, The Venture of Islam. Each of the three words of the title of this manifesto point to three interconnected aspects found in Hodgson’s major work that has the subtitle of “Conscience and History in a World Civilization,” placing Hodgson’s project in a moral as well as a historical dimension.1 In Lawrence’s view, the Hodgsonian mission failed to bring about the shift in thinking that he hoped. Lawrence writes, “At the most basic level each [term in the title, Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit] connotes a surplus: Islamicate is more than Islamic or Muslim, Cosmopolitan is more than congenial or civil, and Spirit is more than subject or agent. Together Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit projects the presence of a tidal wave in world history that remains hidden for most, [End Page 92] opaque for many, and misunderstood even by experts” (p. xvi). In this manifesto, Lawrence exhorts us to take strong action to revise our thinking and those of our students to a pan-world perspective. Because Lawrence’s Manifesto is so closely linked to Hodgson’s Venture, it must be viewed with Venture in mind. Marshall Hodgson, a professor at the University of Chicago and chairman of the interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought, died in 1968, and his Venture of Islam was completed from his notes and published by the University of Chicago Press in 1974. Its broad vision of the role of Islamicate civilization was quickly embroiled in controversy over his use of the term “Islamicate.” This neologism was meant to distinguish between the religion of Islam, that is things and ideas Islamic, and the wider civilization that was Islamicate. This distinction was meant to open a discussion of Islamicate civilization to include groups usually identified as Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Buddhists and others who were part of the culture and history of the Islamicate world and decenter the discussion of world civilization away from the teleological imperative of Western Christian culture and the subject of religion. In Lawrence’s “Preamble,” he asks, “Why Islamicate, why now, why me?” His answers inform the reader who he is and why he is so strongly engaged with this subject in the manifesto. It is a reference to Hodgson’s urging that we reveal who we are and the pre-commitments that we bring to any discussion. For Hodgson, this is the beginning of realizing the force of Conscience in the projects of writing and teaching world history. In Lawrence’s work, we learn that he started using The Venture of Islam for an undergraduate class at Duke University in 1976, only a year after its publication.2 As Lawrence recalls Venture’s reception among his students and colleagues, his experience reflects a broader reception among students and colleagues who struggled with Hodgson’s neologisms and his challenges to re-think and re-center our values when we make our modern Euro-American world the standard against which we measure the rest of the world and its past. Even before 1979, the year that the Iranian Revolution brought Islam to Western headlines and consciousness, the term Islam had acquired fraught and pejorative connotations and distorted interpretations that entailed prejudices and misinterpretations. The word had become too loaded and charged to be analytically useful for talking about the fourteen centuries of Islam’s existence and its world-wide spread. Prophet Muhammad’s...